WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 23: ENGLAND IN MEMORY (Sonnet)
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

A collection of short poems written by a soldier in captivity reflecting on home, memory, and the experience of imprisonment. The verse moves between intimate domestic images—mother, English gardens, county landscapes—and the hardships of internment, loneliness, and comradeship, often blending pastoral detail with wartime grief and wry humor. Forms vary from ballades and sonnets to rondel and villanelle, and recurring motifs include nature, loss, longing, and reflections on duty and sacrifice. Many pieces juxtapose the small joys of remembered rural life with the starkness of prison, producing restrained lyricism that balances tenderness, anger, and quiet faith.

ENGLAND IN MEMORY
(Sonnet)

Sweet Motherland, what have I done for thee,
What suffered, what of lasting beauty made?
I who ungratefully and undismayed
Drank from thy breast the milk which nourished me
In childhood, which until my death must be
The life within my veins. Lo, from that shade
Wherein they rest, thy dead and mine, arrayed
In honour’s robes, come clear and plaintively
Voices for ever to my listening ear
Which cry, “Not yet is finished England’s fight!
Still, still must poets strive and martyrs bleed
To overthrow the enemies of Light,
Armies of Dullness, Cruelty, Lust, and Greed!”
Yet what have I done for thee, England dear?